What the King of Hawaii Can Teach Us About Trump

To the ever-expanding literature of How to Explain Trump, I’d like to add a short little fable. It was first told 35 years ago by Alasdair MacIntyre, one of our greatest living philosophers, but it concerns an actual event that took place in the kingdom of Hawaii in 1819, many years before it was annexed by the United States. MacIntyre didn’t really intend it to be a story about politics, but I think it speaks to our political moment more directly than any op-ed you’ll read, because it’s a story about the rules we take for granted, and about what happens when those rules become hollow.

Once, in the kingdom of Hawaii, there was a set of unwritten rules—whose name English-speaking writers spelled “taboo”—that governed all kinds of everyday activities. One of them, for instance, forbade men and women from eating together; others forbade certain foods. In 1819, a new king, Kamehameha II, came to the throne and decided to do away with the taboos. The rules had held sway for longer than anyone could remember, and many predicted a tremendous backlash if the king went through with his plan. But Kamehameha was adamant: He declared that the taboos were abolished, and so they were.

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And nothing else happened. That’s the story.

I can’t be the only one who has lost count of the democratic norms—the unwritten, informal, but hugely important rules that help us govern ourselves—that now seem to be gone with as little consequence as the taboos in the story. If you’re running for president, you don’t even raise the possibility that the election won’t count if you don’t win. You don’t threaten to throw your opponent in jail if you do win. If you change your mind about throwing your opponent in jail, you don’t explain it as an act of mercy, because that’s not how the rule of law works. If you’re running for president, and especially if you get elected, you release your tax returns, so voters can know that you’re not financially compromised by foreign governments, or by corporations seeking to do business with the United States. You put your assets in a blind trust, so you never confuse your self-interest with the public interest. You don’t accuse millions of Americans of voter fraud without evidence. You don’t compromise civilian control of the armed forces. You don’t let your team threaten to lock up journalists who investigate you.

You don’t do those things, until, one day, you do. The only thing holding you back in most cases is the force of custom, and there are times and places—Hawaii in 1819, or America in 2016—when custom is so weak that it’s no force at all.

Of course, Donald Trump didn’t need to be a political genius to realize that norms like these were historically weak. He only needed to watch the news. In just the last eight years, we’ve watched the unthinkable become the debatable and then the unexceptionable. We’ve seen President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee denied even a hearing for nearly a year, and we’ve seen his other nominees blockaded at an historic rate. We’ve seen real, live U.S. senatorspromise that no justice nominated by a Democratic president would ever be confirmed. We’ve seen credible threats to default on the national debt. We’ve seen the president’s budget director denied even the right to propose a budget to Congress. We’ve seen the president expand executive power in response to all of this, in a way that’s troubling even to some liberals. We’ve seen the Senate filibuster go from rare to routine—and watched Senate Democrats retaliate by partially nuking the filibuster. It was laughable when a member of Congress interrupted the State of the Union to call the president a liar—until a movement calling the president a liar about his birthplace launched his successor to power.

Each step of the way, we liberals and progressives have duly complained, and our complaints have achieved almost nothing, because each of these steps has been within the letter of the law. We’ve learned how much the letter of the law omits. But we have not come to terms with what all of these broken norms mean, taken as a whole. If we spend the next four or eight years cataloguing each Trump outrage and patiently explaining to ourselves why this one—surely, it has to be—is finally a bridge too far, we’ll only be repeating our mistake.

Instead, we have to come to terms with living in a time of post-norm politics—by which I don’t mean that all of our political norms are suddenly defunct, but rather that the continued rolling back of norms we’ve taken for granted has to stop surprising us. Rather than thinking reactively, and feeding the Trump outrage cycle, we ought to understand him as exposing a pre-existing rot. We need to think about why norms fail in general, and how to act when we can’t rely on them. Only then will we stop underestimating the sheer difficulty of one day rebuilding them.

MacIntyre’s point is that King Kamehameha was pushing on a door that had already been opened: The taboos had lost their cultural power long before they were formally abolished. And so it was with Trump today: It’s about us, not him. The systemic failure of norms tells us less about the qualities of the person doing the pushing than about the ways in which rules lose their hold over us. (And that’s true whether the loss of the rules is seriously frightening, as I think it is in our case, or much less so, as MacIntyre seems to think in his case.)

Taboo-like rules usually have a history in two stages, MacIntyre argued. In the first stage, the rules are part of a social context that makes them intelligible and authoritative. In other words, they’re part of a worldview that gives them meaning and power—it might be a traditional religion, or it might be a political culture. But cultures change, and when they do, the rules that once made sense within them start to seem alien, outdated and pointless. This is the second stage: “Deprive the taboo rules of their original context and they at once are apt to appear as a set of arbitrary prohibitions, as indeed they characteristically do appear when the initial context is lost,” writes MacIntyre. “In such a situation the rules have been deprived of any status that can secure their authority.”

If this describes our situation, then the question becomes: What was the context that gave our norms meaning? What could justify foregoing very real power—the power to shape the Supreme Court, or the power to enrich your family—just for the sake of custom, just because other people have foregone it in the past?

It’s tempting to answer something like “liberal democracy,” and to point to all of the ways in which the behavior of Trump and his Republican enablers endangers democratic values. But I think that’s overintellectualizing things. Evan McMullin—the independent conservative candidate for president who has emerged as a powerful critic of Trump—falls into something like that error when he offers this solution: “We can no longer assume that all Americans understand the origins of their rights and the importance of liberal democracy. We need a new era of civic engagement that will reawaken us to the cause of liberty and equality.”

But asking people to better “understand” democratic norms makes our job too difficult in some ways, and too easy in others. It makes it too difficult because we usually follow norms out of habit, not out of intellectual conviction. It makes it too easy because, once such habits are broken, rebuilding them requires much more than the force of argument. When a system of norms is healthy, you don’t follow them because you can reconstruct compelling, first-principles arguments for them. Of course, it’s good that those arguments exist, so that we can step back from time to time and reflect critically on our rules for political conduct. But on a day-to-day level, the “correct” answer to a question like “Should you threaten to jail your opponent?” is not “No, and here are five reasons why.” It’s “Are you crazy?”

When a system of norms is healthy, “Are you crazy?” works in practice because it draws on the force of habit—your own habits, and the collective habits that solidify as precedent and custom. At their strongest, norms are ways of rendering certain uses of power nearly unthinkable and unspeakable. You don’t threaten to jail your opponent because, well, you just don’t.

And because political norms work like this, their strength often depends on some really elusive concepts. If most of the norms I’ve mentioned so far amount to a mutual habit of not using all of the legal power at our disposal against one another, then norms require a high degree of social trust. If the norms I’ve mentioned require political elites who want to win at most costs—but not all costs—then they require elites who have some degree of solidarity with one another, and some degree of leeway from the public. Our populist moment is well aware, and rightfully so, of all the ways in which political elites can be self-serving and corrupt—but it misses the ways in which elites can also keep norms of restraint alive in practice. Just look at what happened in the House this week, when Republicans tried to roll back congressional ethics reforms. It turns out that populism isn’t ridding us of elites. It’s only empowering them to act with less restraint.

We can’t understand what’s happening to our political norms without understanding the polarization of our elites: As the space of overlap shrinks, willingly giving up any advantage to which you’re legally entitled makes less and less sense. And we can’t be intellectually honest about this polarization without acknowledging that it’s “asymmetric”: As the bipartisan duo Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann have exhaustively documented, it is overwhelmingly driven by “the radicalization of the Republican party—not just in terms of ideology but also in an utter rejection of the norms and civic culture underlying our constitutional system.” We might explain that radicalization, in turn, by pointing to the power of the conservative media-industrial complex, or to the fear of demographic change that raises the stakes of each new election. But just as elites have lost faith with one another, the public—which watched our best and brightest suffer virtually no consequences for getting us into the Iraq War and a financial crisis—has lost faith in the elite. Members of a political elite that enjoyed public confidence might be able to get away with treating one another with restraint and mutual forbearance; but in an elite as distrusted as ours, those same behaviors start to look like corrupt self-dealing.

And yet, there’s no logical link from one broken norm to the next. There’s no theory of government that gets you from denying Merrick Garland a hearing to threatening the editor of the New York Times to attempting to nullify a governor’s election in North Carolina. Again, though, norms are habits, not arguments—they’re an integral structure of behaviors, not independent propositions. They’re bound together in complex ways, and few of us are wise enough to predict how the whole structure will move when we displace any one part of it. That used to be a core conservative insight. But the recklessness of our right—its assurance that you can elevate a Sarah Palin without paving the way for a Donald Trump—shows that “conservatism” is only its slogan.

Now, the rest of us need to come to terms with the damage. We know much more about destroying norms than about creating them, and what we do know about creating them gives us little reason for optimism. Habits aren’t argued into existence—and absent the fragile conditions that I’ve discussed, appeals to what is or ought to be normal function as little more than “virtue signaling.” Once gone, rebuilding political habits takes the slow accretion of practice and precedent, or the kind of dangerous revolutionary change that can, at great cost, build reverence for a new political culture. In the late 1830s, when a young Abraham Lincoln looked at the decay of democratic norms in his own time, he concluded that saving them would require fostering a new kind of “political religion,” founded on veneration of the Founders who had only recently passed out of living memory. Of course, Lincoln lived to see that things weren’t so simple: “religions” aren’t argued into existence, either. But he became part of a long tradition in Western thought that treated political founders and lawgivers as semi-mythical figures. It’s a tradition that doesn’t so much express hope that such a figure will happen along as much as it expresses humility: Ordinary people aren’t good at creating political cultures from scratch, so if we happen to find ourselves inside one that more or less works, we had better take care of it.

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That’s why the job of liberals and progressives in a post-norm politics is so difficult. It encompasses taking care of what’s left without deceiving ourselves about the damage already done—retaining our right to criticize norms (something that liberals are good at) while cultivating a respect for the fragility of norms in general (something we’re less good at). In general, we ought to have both a long-term goal and a short-term goal. In the long term, we want to find our way back to a level of social trust that can allow democratic norms to recover. But in the short term, we need to be honest with ourselves that that’s not likely to happen any time soon—and we need to operate in the post-norm world with our eyes open. I’ll finish by sketching four broad ways that liberals and progressives can help realize those goals.

First, we need to recognize that the past isn’t the property of conservatives. Progressives like Corey Robin have pointed out that reverence for history and tradition have been just as much a part of the left as the right, and historians on the left like Steve Fraser have told the stories of those moments in which “passionate attachments to immemorial traditions and ancient creeds—one might say to a useable or empowering past—were conjoined to creative methods of reconfiguring the future.” It’s not enough for us to look to the past with an eye toward exposing its sins. We have to look to it, as well, with an eye toward making myths—shared stories of the kind that Lincoln identified as essential to self-government. Keeping a long historical memory is a way of holding on to the strangeness of this political moment: It minimizes the chances that Trump’s breaks with the past will solidify into new precedents of their own. And reverence for a shared past helps to build the kind of social trust that is a precondition of getting things done collectively.

Second, putting inequality at the center of our agenda isn’t mainly about winning a few more Rust Belt votes. It’s about something much more existential. It’s the global discrediting of elites that made right-wing radicalism—represented here by Trump and the Republicans, in Britain by Nigel Farage, in France by Marine Le Pen, in Germany by Frauke Petry, and so on—appear increasingly plausible. What good are the claims of habit and custom—“this is how we’ve always done things”—when the way we’ve always done things seems to be failing so many of us? It will be nearly impossible to rebuild democratic norms as long as elites are so distrusted, and they’re likely to remain distrusted as long as they’re capturing such a massive share of economic growth.

Third, nearly all of the gains for progressive policy over the next four or eight years are going to come on the state and local level, from the spread of the $15/hour minimum wage, to the sanctuary cities movement, to rolling back mass incarceration and the drug war. Not only do we need to take state and local elections more seriously, but we need to be ready with a principled case in defense of liberal federalism to protect these gains against the Trump administration. In a broad sense, I’d suggest that decentralized policy-making serves the same goal as fighting economic inequality: It lowers the stakes of norm-breaking on the federal level. It also acts as a kind of escape-valve for political conflict at a time of elite polarization.

Of course, federalism and “states rights” have long been used as excuses for disenfranchisement—so, fourth and finally, the above can only be morally defensible if it’s coupled with the strongest possible efforts to strengthen one of the federal government’s core functions: the protection of voting rights on all levels. A campaign for a Voting Rights Amendment, to undo the damage that the Roberts Court and Republican-dominated state governments have done to the legacy of the civil rights movement, would be too late to reverse the massive and coordinated voter-suppression campaign that helped to swing this election. But it can be a powerful tool to mobilize progressive voters in the years ahead.

Crucially, though, a push to expand the electorate and to make voting easier—say, by instituting national voting by mail or making Election Day a federal holiday—will look different in a time of post-norm politics. Maybe there are times when we can talk about voting with platitudes like “letting everyone’s voice be heard” or “helping people do their civic duty”—when we can think of voting as something somehow above politics—but now is not one of them. Here’s an example of the wrong way to do it: “The Voting Rights Act stands weakened, its future subject to political rancor. How can that be? The Voting Rights Act was one of the crowing achievements of our democracy, the result of Republican and Democratic efforts.”

That was President Obama at the 50thanniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery march, and while I understand the need to speak inclusively on an anniversary like that, those lines get the history almost completely backward. We haven’t expanded voting rights by elevating them above “political rancor.” We’ve expanded voting rights because of “political rancor.” We can’t speak convincingly—few people ever have—about expanding voting rights without speaking at the same time about what those rights are for.

Expanding political participation has always been tied, explicitly, to advancing progressive goals. In America, the movement that won voting rights for black Americans was also a movement against the Vietnam War and for a living wage. In Europe, the movements that demanded universal male suffrage around the turn of the 20th century coupled it with demands for an eight-hour workday, and often fought for it through general strikes. They believed that “the vote was the one means by which the masses could translate numbers into power.”

Our argument, then, shouldn’t be that disenfranchisement is wrong because it violates a neutral standard of just how accessible voting ought to be. When and if incoming Attorney General Jeff Sessions, for instance, redirects the efforts of the Justice Department toward investigating fraudulent claims of voting fraud and puts the federal imprimatur on voter suppression, we shouldn’t act predictably horrified. We should thank him for clarifying the stakes: People with economic power have always wanted to make political power as narrow as possible, and people excluded from economic power have always wanted to make political power as broad as possible.

If that sounds intolerably crude to you, it sounds the same way to me. But that is politics the way Edmund Burke saw that it must be when consensus falls apart, politics without “all the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle … all the decent drapery of life.” We can regret it, and we can plan for the day when the drapery might one day be patched together again. But we cannot be willingly blind to where we stand. One way of being blind is imagining that we are in for four or eight years of roughly ordinary politics. Another and more dangerous way of being blind is pretending—in a way the fable of the taboos is supposed to warn us against—that our problems begin and end with our next president.